Join us for a day dedicated to art!

In line with the University of Tennessee’s goals to provide opportunities to engage in rich learning that is collaborative, inquiry-based, experiential, and intercultural, the Italian Program is pleased to offer Italian Art Day. This event spans a whole morning (9:10 am - 1:30 pm), involving all classes of Italian, and taking place at the International House. Well-renowned local artist Annie Rochelle studied Restoration and Conservation in Florence, Italy, and will illustrate how her work has been influenced by Italian classical art, connecting the past with the present via material culture.

This event is offered to provide our undergraduate students with direct learning experience, and first-hand art appreciation. The artist will illustrate the origins of her inspiration, and how she performs her work, all by allowing students to start on their very own watercolor projects.

Meet the artist

Annie Rochelle is an artist living and working in her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is a Maryland Institute College of Art graduate with a BFA in Painting and Art History. A student in Florence, Italy, studying art conservation and art history, Rochelle is an artist whose work uses traditional forms of drawing and painting combined with chance-based compositions, double images, and alternate canvas structures to explore themes of perspective in our relationship with the environment. Her work sits at the nexus of art history, iconography, gender equality, and ecology. The works that best capture the Italian influence are the series titled Mythos/Dogma. This series is vibrant with antithesis: irreverent and referential, traditional and contemporary, chaotic and ordered, the combination of high and low art. One of the themes of this series is the restitution of female agency in Greco-Roman myth and the artistic canon, inviting the viewer to re-examine the contrived mythologies, longstanding stereotypes, and unfounded hegemony we perpetuate through visual art. Her studies in Italy, her interest in Greco-Roman mythology and archaeology, and her iconography, both past and present are through lines in her work. In explaining her work to students, she will tie art and artifacts from Italian material culture to the present. She will show the relationship between her work, specific examples of art history, and her experience with art conservation and restoration with images of pieces she has worked on. She will address how to identify restoration (in-painting) from original work, the philosophies and ethics behind art conservation, and how this experience has impacted her work. She will provide an overview of the watercolor technique, incorporated with an explanation and demonstration of image transfer techniques utilized by Italian fresco artists. Cultivating an art appreciation firsthand, students can leave with a watercolor piece they can begin during the class and finish at home by utilizing the skills learned in the class.